As the telecommunication industry evolves, new flexible and extendable technologies are being introduced into the network that allow for the provisioning of distributed services to the customer. Broadband services, multimedia services and personnel communications services (PCS) are some of the services that are soon to be introduced. These services will be provided to customers from a plurality of service providers using a distributed service platforms over a communications infrastructure. When such services are requested by a customer, different service control, resource control and management components are invoked in order to provide the customer with the requested services. The customer, in using the requested service, places different usage requirements on these components. Collecting data on such usage of the different components and correlating this usage to the customer is necessary to accomplish such basic business functions as billing, marketing and/or fraud detection.
Using a key to correlate data from multiple distributed sources is well known in the art. One well known method is "implicit key correlation" another is "static key correlation". Implicit key correlation is a concept whereby the key that is used correlate data is information that is normally part of the usage record (such as date and time or phone number). This is the method currently used in telephony billing. Static key correlation is a method whereby a constant key is used by all service components whenever a service is activated and this key is inserted into all usage records regardless of who invoked the component.
However, there are problems with these two methods in an environment of flexible distributed services. Regarding implicit key correlation, a simple example that illustrates a problem is what happens in an 800 phone call. Once a user places an 800 phone call, the 800 number is translated into a local phone number reflecting the network location where the call should be terminated. When using implicit key correlation and with the implicit key being the phone number, the usage records generated before the translation cannot be correlated with the usage records generated after the translation because the phone number has changed.
A problem with static key correlation methods is that it does not provide a capability for capturing the sequence of invocation for the different components of the service that generated the records. The sequence of invocation of differing service components is important because in the future, pricing policies of services may be sensitive to the invocation context.
My invention overcomes the limitations in the prior art methods and systems by providing a capability for capturing the sequence in invocation of the various network components used as a result of the service request and the network providing the service.